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Gendered Perspective: Climate Change Adaptation Strategy in Malawi

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Abstract

Recently, the Least Developed Countries Expert Group (LEG) reiterated the need to stress the understanding of climate change adaptation from a gender perspective. This does not only call for integrating the gender dimension into existing conceptual frameworks, but also mainstreaming it to capture existing research gaps and drawing linkages on the themes of characteristics of climatic shock, attributes of affected systems and response characteristics, hence the focus of this chapter. Accordingly, this research set-out to contextualize the gender as a conceptual framework, test the hypothesis that gender is independent from an adaptation strategy and investigate the factors influencing the adaptation strategy. Chi-squared test of independence and multiple logistic regression analysis were employed. The chi squared test produced p-value as 0.216, hence no statistically significant association between gender and type of adaptation strategy was concluded. The regression analysis revealed that: women with a basic and advanced education are more likely to adopt autonomous adaptation strategy compared to women without education; access to information resulted in adoption of autonomous adaptation; and women with access to credit are less likely to adapt autonomously. Moreover, poor women are more likely to adopt autonomous adaptation strategy compared to rich women. Therefore, it is recommended that the adaptive capacity of women should be focused on in improving adaptation rather than external support.

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Agbleze, L. (2021). Gendered Perspective: Climate Change Adaptation Strategy in Malawi. In: Behnassi, M., Gupta, H., El Haiba, M., Ramachandran, G. (eds) Social-Ecological Systems (SES). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76247-6_6

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